My main opensource project is called LifestyleLinking. Describing what it means has proven difficult over the years, half due to my poor explaination of it and half because of it visionary nature back when it started. But now the Quantified Self movement and BIG data have brought a context to explain it better. What is being built is a Self Engine. What is a self engine? We all know a search engine brings back results based on keyword inputs, a self engine makes suggestions on information to ‘consume’ based on the authoring of your life. Life captured by web publishing tools, to sensors to your very own DNA. A self engine terms has be used by the folks at Wolframalpha. It think this term will become more common in use as hardware sensors explode in daily life.

Suggestions will ultimately be integrated to make future simulations that can be passed to the make tools to achieve the desired outcomes.

It was sad to read that Doug Engelbart had passed away. During my time in Silicon Valley I was lucky enough to meet with Doug. The SuperHappyDeveloperHouse SHDH had invited him along to surprise him with a demo of his original mouse. When I arrived the house was a buzz with software engineers configuring modern computers to act like those back in the day when Doug invented the mouse and they succeeded. Doug was delighted. And the mouse was not just a pointer device with a click button but a full communication authoring tool complete with hypertext markup that provided machine readable structure as the human input text. Genius and “ahead of his time” describe Doug, with the latter disappointingly making him ‘too risky’ for mainstream venture funding. But that would be look at the world through the glasses of money. Doug stood above that culture and raised the expectations to sheer intelligence itself. He provided the thinking theory, practical delivery of ideas and most importantly the inspiring vision and an exciting vision for tomorrow, that fuelled those developers that evening in SHDH and a whole generation of developers out there on the web today and no doubt tomorrow too.

Doug was driven by a goal to “augment human intellect.” A goal I share. RIP Doug.

Those reading my twitter stream will see sport plays an integral part of my lifestyle. Hill walking, skiing and not forgetting swimming. Swimming is my no. 1 sport and with my Quantified Self recordings, its has been the place I have focused the beginings of my open sport project endeavours, the open sourcing of sport. It started with a Drupal module to enter swimming training times and those recorded at competitions. But this failed to capture efficiently they training data so I have been working on a real time network application to address this issue, TrainTimer is on Github.

Open sourcing sport is something that has been brewing in me for a while. Just like open source software, open sourcing sport brings transparency and the opportunity for all to participate in evolving the applications etc. The key ingredients is to provide a range of tools that enable individuals to capture their sporting data and share it real time anywhere they choose, on their privacy terms. As a data junkie, it is the opportunity to apply data ‘science’ or ‘data’ analysis and discovery to those willing to share and combine their sporting data that makes things exciting.

I enjoy watch sport on the TV from time to time, especially the World and Olympic swimming but there are so many amateur or masters competitions going on all the time too and I am sure provide just as much excitement and sporting endeavour. This project aims to provide the same range of technology tools to these sporting events. As an individual sporting data becomes increasingly and more frequently under scrutiny with dope testing etc. Hopefully, this open sourcing of sporting data will give the individual the ability to transparently show all when need their sporting story. I think it will be this transparency in competition that will provide the ‘test’ of comparison in the future.

Sport brings much fun to my life and hopefully some of the tools we can build in this project will being additional opportunities for fun to flourish too.

I often joke that I am on a 4 week ‘holiday’ in Silicon Valley. The reality is, its more like a semester at University at Phd level. There is just so much to learn and take in, from the subject matter being spoken about to the presentation style. Everyone around you is extremely bright and that means every person you sit next to at the start of a presentation or during a lunch time or coffee break will have something interesting to say. My best conversations this week have happened by chance. While the mind is getting a full workout, I’ve also managed two swims, pretty hard work but hopefully my fitness will return now the sun is shining bright.

As for the pitch for the week, what to you do? I lead on open source project that allows an individual to data mine themselves and then share the answers. Seems to be working well.